Description

The early Christian Church was a chaos of contending beliefs. Some groups of Christians claimed that there was not one God but two or twelve or thirty. Some believed that the world had not been created by God but by a lesser, ignorant deity. Certain sects maintained that Jesus was human but not divine, while others said he was divine but not human. In Lost Christianities, Bart D. Ehrman offers a fascinating look at these early forms of Christianity and shows how they came to be suppressed, reformed, or forgotten. All of these groups insisted that they upheld the teachings of Jesus and his apostles, and they all possessed writings that bore out their claims, books reputedly produced by Jesus's own followers. Modern archaeological work has recovered a number of key texts, and as Ehrman shows, these spectacular discoveries reveal religious diversity that says much about the ways in which history gets written by the winners.
Ehrman's discussion ranges from considerations of various "lost scriptures"-including forged gospels supposedly written by Simon Peter, Jesus's closest disciple, and Judas Thomas, Jesus's alleged twin brother-to the disparate beliefs of such groups as the Jewish-Christian Ebionites, the anti-Jewish Marcionites, and various "Gnostic" sects. Ehrman examines in depth the battles that raged between "proto-orthodox Christians"- those who eventually compiled the canonical books of the New Testament and standardized Christian belief-and the groups they denounced as heretics and ultimately overcame. Scrupulously researched and lucidly written, Lost Christianities is an eye-opening account of politics, power, and the clash of ideas among Christians in the decades before one group came to see its views prevail.show more

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About Bart D. Ehrman

Bart D. Ehrman chairs the Department of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. An authority on the early Church and the life of Jesus, he has appeared on A&E, the History Channel, CNN, and other television and radio shows. He has taped several highly popular lecture series for the "Teaching Company" and is the author of The New Testament: A Historical Introduction to the Early Christian Writings (Third Edition, OUP, 2003) and Jesus, Apocalyptic Prophet of the New Millennium (OUP, 1999).show more

Table of contents

Chapter One: Recouping Our Loses ; PART ONE: Forgeries and Discoveries ; Chapter Two: The Ancient Discovery of a Forgery: Serapion and the Gospel of Peter ; Chapter Three: The Ancient Forgery of a Discovery: The Acts of Paul and Thecla ; Chapter Four: The Discovery on an Ancient Forgery: the Coptic Gospel of Thomas ; Chapter Five: The Forgery of an Ancient Discovery? Morton Smith and the Secret Gospel of Mark ; PART TWO: Heresies and Orthodoxies ; Chapter Six: At Polar Ends of the Spectrum: Early Christian Ebionites and Marcionites ; Chapter Seven: Christians "In the Know": The Worlds of Early Christian Gnosticism ; Chapter Eight: On the Road to Nicea: The Broad Swath of Proto-Orthodox Christianity ; PART THREE: Winners and Losers ; Chapter Nine: The Quest for Orthodoxy ; Chapter Ten: The Arsenal of the Conflicts: Polemical Treatises and Personal Slurs ; Chapter Eleven: Additional Weapons in the Proto-Orthodox Arsenal: Forgeries and Falsifications ; Chapter Twelve: The Invention of Scripture: The Formation of the Proto-Orthodox New Testament ; Chapter Thirteen: Winners, Losers, and the Question of Toleranceshow more